A place to share my love of baking and feeding people -- family, friends and strangers. These are culinary adventures from my Northeast Portland kitchen and Trinity Episcopal Cathedral's Wednesday Community Meal.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Monkey Cookies And Some "Face" Tips

I like how these Monkey Cookies turned out but I admit it, I'm not a skilled artist and by far, my biggest cookie decorating insecurity is making faces.

Eye placement, proportion, realism, these are all things that trip me up and stress me out. But I won't deny a cookie request because of this, and have learned a few tricks that help me face making faces.

The first trick is study your subject — Look at pictures, drawings and sketches and find one that is simplified and showcases what you want your final product to look like.

The second trick is to sketch a design — Trace your cookie cutter onto a piece of paper and using just a pencil, decorate it. Take your time, erase if necessary, and get the design exactly how you want it.

The third trick is to cut a guide that you can trace onto your cookie with an edible marker — There's no shame in doing this and it helps keep all your cookies uniform.

The final trick is when it comes to adding the eyes, nose, mouth and other face features, add them onto a plate first — You don't want to ruin a perfectly good cookie with a failed test run, so drop those eyes and other features onto a plate first and get them right before you add them onto your cookies.

Here's how I made these Monkey Cookies:

I baked my cookies and sketched my design.

I cut a guide for the face that I traced onto the cookies with an edible marker.

This guide will make the decorating so much easier and keep all my cookies uniform.

I outlined the guidelines with light brown icing using a #2 tip.

Using the same icing and tip, I immediately filled in the lines.

I also outlined and filled in a moon shape on all of the ears.

While the face icing was still wet, I dropped on the eyes, nose and mouth using thinned black icing and a #1 tip. Then, using my scribe tool, I added a tiny drop of blue icing to each eye. I also used my scribe tool to draw through the mouth and elongate it on both sides.

The final step was to outline the rest of the cookie with dark brown flood consistency icing using a #1 tip. I used the small tip because the areas around the ears and under the chin are narrow and I wanted to be sure to have good control.